The Guest
by Fishielicious
Summary: Spring cleaning gets even more agonizing when Remus goes to clean out the flat he had shared with Sirius before the events of Halloween 1981 and is forced to revisit some painful memories and moldy perishables.


**A/N: written circa 2006. R/S  
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I am not sure I should be here. I almost forget why I've come, walking into the living room I've carefully avoided for almost three months now. No one else has been here, either, and there's a sugar-coating of dust on every exposed surface. I run my finger through it on the coffee table and create a trail like a snowplow's, weaving around the remote control, an open magazine, and a half-full cup of coffee. I won't go into detail about what else I find in that cup along with stone-cold coffee, but it seems that we have both had an extremely taxing three months, the coffee cup and I.

My instinct is to pick it up and treat it to a rigorous cleaning in the kitchen sink, but I am not here to clean right now. I've got others coming later to help me empty the place, and I wouldn't have it in me by myself, anyway. I can't look at the cup very long - the side most visible to me contains the curly end of a sloppily written 's' and I have no interest in seeing the rest of the word scrawled there.

I have to remind myself why I _am _here. The box of heavy-duty dustbin bags in my left hand helps, and I decide to start my task in the tiny kitchen pasted thoughtlessly off the side of living room. There will be fewer personal items to deal with there.

Unfortunately, kitchen supplies tend to all look the same, and to get very mixed up over the course of two years' cohabitation, and quite frankly I have no idea whose is whose anymore. I reason that really, if I don't even know what's mine and what's his, I won't mind using any of it, and move on to the food cupboards.

Cocoa Pops: his. He bought a box as in impulse purchase the time he became enamoured with Muggle shopping, and supermarkets in particular. He fell in love and ever since he ate Cocoa Pops for breakfast every morning. Once, at lunch, I caught him with a Cocoa Pop-sandwich. I asked him if I were now living with a seven-year-old, and he responded by asking me if I liked 'seafood', then sticking his tongue out with a mouthful of chewed up cereal and bread on it and cackling madly.

In the bag. This is going to take weeks if every item I find has an unnecessarily detailed memory attached to it. Thankfully, the cupboards are mostly empty - trust two twenty-two-year-old boys to put off shopping until the only other option is starving. I find myself thinking of the me back then - just three months ago - as if I've aged a decade or more since.

I run my fingers through my fringe and nerve myself to get back to it. Cinnamon buns, mine, but long expired, join the Cocoa Pops in the bag. Ownership of the Hostess snack-cakes was often hotly debated, but I assume that they are also past their prime and toss them into the bag. Most things in the cupboard, in fact, are. I throw away bread, bagels, and rather regretfully a tin of my favourite biscuits that smell a little dodgy. However, there's still peanut butter and a scant amount of sugar and flour that I'm confident enough to stake a claim on (and who is here to argue with me?), and they're all that's left when I shut up the cupboards again. The part of my mind that is more inclined to find humour in situations that are difficult to the rest of me thinks it's funny that I'm still picking fights with him after he's long gone - as good as dead.

I open the ice box. There's an almost full jar of mustard and an empty one of mayonnaise that are both without question mine. He hated them, except in egg salad and we hadn't been foolhardy enough to purchase eggs in ages. I throw away the jar of mayonnaise anyway, since it's empty. The same fate awaits the tin of cream cheese. We both ate it and it's thick with mold anyway. It smells awful. I pick it up with the tips of my fingers and drop it into the bag. Then I notice I'm making the face where I scrunch up my nose and clench the tip of my tongue between my teeth that he always made incessant fun of. I stop. There's some jelly left, which I decide to keep before moving on to the last remaining item: A carton of orange juice that's been marked up again and again with fat, black marker strokes. I remember it. Of course I remember it. Towards the end it was one of our only sources of fun - one of our only sources of contact at all.

I press the heel of my hand to my forehead and close my eyes. A carton of orange juice should not cause this feeling that someone is yanking my innards about. It should not be this important to me. It must've gone bad ages ago and always had too much pulp for my taste anyway. It's stupid, it doesn't mean anything.

But at the same time... I remember the morning it became more than what it was to the two of us. I was up early, but he'd either left before I woke or had not come home the night before. I'd been sleeping like a rock in the very few hours I got those days and couldn't even remember if I'd seen him at all before collapsing into bed. That had made me quite unhappy at the time. I didn't think it was fair that we got so little time together anymore. I had been angry we'd been forced to act so old in our youth, and when I opened the ice box and saw the orange juice I clearly recalled bringing home a few days before marked in black lines with his name - he had the juvenile tendency to claim everything he owned by writing his name on it - my eye twitched. At first I thought I was annoyed. It was just like him to take things that weren't his. He'd always been a big fan of borrowing without asking, and I had not always been happy that the trait only seemed to magnify itself when we moved in together.

But, even as I started working up my righteous indignation, my irritation fell flat. Really, in those trying times, I couldn't be so aggravated because of orange juice. If anything, it was a cause for amusement. The way he acted like a child could be endearing and certainly the way that his handwriting had always echoed the little boy in him rather than the considerable intelligence he'd grown into was. So I'd rooted through the drawers for that marker and crossed out his name to write mine. Then I poured myself a glass to have with my cinnamon bun and put the carton back in the ice box, pleased with myself.

Sure enough, the next day when I got up and he was gone, the orange juice carton had my name scratched out and his written again.

Since then it had become a game. Day after day of scratching out each other's name and replacing it with our own. I kept doing it even after I stopped drinking it in the mornings - which was soon, because I really preferred something with caffeine - and I was certain he did, too, because the carton remained far too full for him to have been drinking on it constantly.

Now, looking at that last tangible sign of affection we shared, I don't know what to do. I try to think back to which of us must have eventually won the custody war. The last time I was at the flat at all was the day before Halloween. He must have been home Halloween morning at least. He must have won, but I can't nerve myself to check. My impulse is to push it away, hide it behind something else, but there's nothing here to disguise it. I reach to throw it away, but hesitate. I don't want to touch it, and my resolve to throw it away is wavering at best, so I close the door (out of sight, out of mind) and leave the kitchen.

The living room is next. It's a mess of our things, sprawled far and wide. I can't imagine trying to sort through all of it and I don't think there's anything very important of mine on the floor, so I write it all off to be cleared out later, when help arrives.

Of course, I doubt there's enough plastic bags in the universe to hold all the rubbish in what used to be our - and I guess still is my - living room. It's mid-shin deep in some places. I think I hear rustling and am deeply worried that there's something more sinister than a mouse living under the solid layer of old newspapers, pizza boxes, and empty beer bottles. I wonder briefly if the cannabis plant he'd adopted as a pet more than a year ago is buried somewhere and if perhaps I _should_sort it all out on my own on that plant's account. It wouldn't look good if someone else found it.

But after all I've been through recently, I hardly think they'd punish me now for possessing the dead and shriveled cannabis of my ex-'roommate' the traitor.

I hadn't meant to think that. The traitor bit. Of course I'm constantly thinking about it one way or another, but every time I think it 'out loud', at the front of my mind, I freeze. God. Can't be. And I try to shake it off, banish it soundly to the farthest corners of my mind because it's something I can't deal with and I'm not brash enough to try. So far, it's been working surprisingly well, just shutting it off.

I've kept myself busy these three months, doing anything and everything just to avoid having any time to myself to think. When I'm not raking lawns or cleaning out gutters for small change I'm practically Dumbledore's errand boy, as I'm the only one still eager to do what he asks. Everyone else wants to go back to their normal lives, now, post-war. I want to do anything and everything to avoid the scattered remnants of my 'normal life'. I know Dumbledore sometimes has to invent jobs for me, but I can't bring myself to stop asking for them. He's the only one who seems to understand. Everyone else thinks I'm so fragile now, they want to pretend I'm sick and put me up in a room with lots of bed rest and a constant nursemaid so they'll feel like they're taking care of me, and I won't 'do something rash'. I think they think I might crack and end up killing myself or something equally ludicrous. They don't want to be responsible for that, they don't want to be blamed for losing the last of us - the last-standing Gryffindor boy of our year. They think I _have _to be addled somehow, after losing all my friends all at once. They think, if it were them they'd lose their minds.

Well, they might. But I'm perfectly fine when I don't think about it. It's easiest when I'm away, when I don't have to even be near Britain. Dumbledore sends me abroad often, to the far corners of the wide and windy world. But right now I'm here again, in London. In the flat, for god's sake, and it's impossible to not-think when everything I see has something to do with him. Every little thing is some stupid lie he told and...

I take a deep breath when I realise that I'm about to completely lose my cool and do... something, I don't really know what. Throw furniture, break bottles. Honestly, I couldn't possibly put the room in a worse state than it's in now with all my worst rampaging, but I know that losing control is something I do not do, as a matter of principle and strenuous conditioning.

I came here to perform a task, and that's all. That's what I'm going to do. I move to the bookshelf to see if there's anything to be salvaged. The bottom shelves are easy. The wizarding comic books are all his and the Muggle ones are mine. We definitely had conflicting opinions about what made a proper superhero. I was wholly uninterested in his precious Warrior Warlock series and kept trying to point out to him that the hero spent altogether too much time battling goblins and giants and _werewolves_ and that it was all just furthering negative stereotypes and he really ought to see how ridiculous it all was, but he just laughed at me. _It's just a comic book, Moony, honestly._

Well of course I knew that, but it didn't change the fact that the target audience was children and they didn't know any better and if it was implanted in their minds so early on that werewolves were evil, then... Still arguing. It seems I can't help but argue with memories.

And of course he found my Muggle comic books highly amusing. He laughed that Batman didn't even have _any_ special powers. I explained patiently that his lack of superhuman abilities was what made him so unique as a superhero. I even coaxed him into giving Batman a chance and we sat on the couch with an issue laid out, balanced across both our laps. He mostly giggled at all the ridiculous things The Caped Crusader had to come up with in order to combat evil without the aid of magic. He was of the opinion that if a single wizard popped up in Gotham, he could own the city in a matter of hours. Hell, _he_could take over Gotham.

At this point I was becoming quite irritated with him after spending most of the evening trying to explain the finer beauty of the comic and said somewhat nastily that if he and Batman ever got into a fight I would bet everything I owned on Batman.

He laughed harder than ever at the idea of being beaten by someone he referred to as a Spandex-wearing pouf.

I then asked him what he thought he was, if not a pouf. He'd gone all quiet for a minute and I don't think we ever really resolved the matter. Not that it's of any consequence now. I don't flinch at pushing his Warrior Warlock comics into a new plastic bag. Really it was an awful, unimaginative series. I will never understand why he was so fond of it. I will never understand anything about him, I guess.

The third and fourth shelves are full of our old textbooks. We always said we were saving them to sell half-priced someday, when things got rough. But things had _been_rough. Sometimes, when we were both without steady employment (as we so often seemed to be) but still proud-as-all-fuck we subsisted entirely on shoplifting (which was disgustingly easy for two wizards with lax morals in a Muggle supermarket). But still we kept our schoolbooks. I think that very secretly neither of us wanted to sell them. To sell them would mean that it was really over. I know I didn't want to let go of the years that had been the best of my life. I used to think he felt the same, but now I have no idea what ever went on in his mind.

I don't even think before banishing the lot into the dustbin bag, which isn't nearly durable enough for them.

Then there is a shelf dedicated to our records, magical and Muggle all mixed in together, in what we considered a grand gesture of tolerance and open-mindedness. Music had been one area of life in which we found little to argue about. Neither of us had what could be called discriminating tastes - we mostly listened to what appealed to us at the time, regardless of real merit.

Two summers ago, when we had just finished moving, he found a Doors LP the previous tenants had left behind in - oddly enough - one of the kitchen cupboards. This excited him to no end, even though he was somewhat less than a music afficionado (in fact, music was one of the few areas he was not naturally talented in; despite exhaustive lessons from the age of six he still could barely play 'Chopsticks' on the piano) he still loved listening to it. He was especially excited about the Doors because he remembered loving 'Break on Through' when Peter dated a Muggle-born girl who hero-worshipped Jim Morrison. We'd sit in the common room and she'd put on the record, and we tended to listen very carefully so as to avoid watching her and Peter snog.

The night he found the LP, we were having a little pre-house-warming party celebration with just the two of us and a big bottle of wine.

He put on the record and we curled up on the couch with the wine and were so proud of ourselves for finally moving in together. We were, in fact, just congratulating each other on our brilliance when 'Touch Me' came on the record player. His eyes lit up from Morrison's very first cry of 'Yeah!' and he jumped up, pulling me to my feet (and making me slosh wine all down my front in the process). He grabbed my glass and threw it against the wall (something he'd regret later when he stepped on a shard with his bare foot and once again refused to let me mend it for him. We wasted the wee hours of the morning in the waiting room at St Mungo's with him whining loudly, his foot wrapped in a towel) and we danced. Or rather, he mostly threw me around - spinning and dipping and singing in that sort of tuneless variety of voice that always made me smile. When the song was over, he dipped me one last time and kissed me hard and exuberantly. I don't know if excitement has a taste, but if it does it must be exactly like his mouth that night, tangy with the mix of wine and saliva. He then proclaimed 'Touch Me' to be our song and we had some of the most energetic sex of our relationship to christen our new bed(s) minutes later.

The world seemed so wide open then, with everything out in front of us.

It's ridiculous that we ever thought that way. We should have known, back then even, how bad things were in the world. How things would only get worse for us as time progressed. Or rather, I should have known. He always knew, it seems.

I look at the cover of the dusty LP and think about Jim Morrison, dead at twenty-seven. I hate to do this to him, but my tragedy currently overshadows his, so I drop the record into the dustbin bag and the rest of the shelf joins it shortly. There's not a thing there we didn't listen to together.

The remaining shelves are miscellany. There's the book of sonnets he used to read me over a pitiful candlelit dinner of cheese sandwiches and cheap, stolen wine. I'd always try not to spew my drink, as we never had a lot of it, but it was a futile effort. As soon as he cracked open that book and starting reciting poetry, I'd invariably spout out wine like a fountain every other line until we were both soaking wet, along with our meals and the book and the whole bottle was wasted, but it never seemed to matter because it was easy to be drunk on laughter that made your lungs collapse and your head float off your shoulders and your ribs strain to the breaking point, even with just the tiniest trace of alcohol.

The book is still stained with red wine. I toss it in the bag.

The rest of the bookshelf seems completely inconsequential. He was not big on reading, and once he had read something it was with him forever, so he never felt the need to accumulate books. I, honestly, do not do an awful lot of pleasure reading, either, but he thought I did - probably because I spent so much time in the library at school. He never understood that some of us really did need to revise - and when he couldn't come up with something better, a book was always his default gift to me. I never faulted him for it; he was being as thoughtful as he knew how to be. Most of the remaining books were his presents to me. I used to take them back down to read the inscriptions sometimes. They invariably said ridiculous and highly suggestive things in his trademark uncontrollable hand. I try to shut out the recollections of his face when he presented me with a gift and I read his own words on the inside cover back to him, and these books meet the same unfortunate fate of the others.

Now that the bookshelf looks sadder than ever (especially in comparison to the rest of the room), I turn my back to it and wade across the Ocean of Filth to the mantel. There's a ridiculous number of pictures in dusty silver frames sitting above the bricked-over fireplace. This was not our handiwork, rest assured. Toward the end Lily had become a compulsive shutterbug, especially after Harry was born, and she presented us with large, framed photographs at every possible opportunity. I, personally, began to think she might be going a little nutters when she showed up one day to give us our 'St Patrick's Day present': A photo of all of us minus her (as she was occupied with the position of Mad Bitch With a Camera) in the Potters' living room doing nothing noteworthy and in fact looking all very bleary-eyed and out-of-sorts, except for Harry who looked like he was working on a nappy.

James, however, laughed it off when I mentioned it and told me that if I thought she was bad now, then I should try living with her. I politely declined, decided that if James didn't mind then I shouldn't either, and from that moment on accepted Lily's gifts with patient good-naturedness.

The photos aren't just curious little reminders of Lily's obsessive quirk, anymore. Now I approach them with no small degree of trepidation. They're ancient relics of a time long gone. They're people I vaguely recognise but I'm sure I don't know. The most recent one might have been taken four months ago, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm looking at pictures of my distant ancestors; connected to me, but entirely inaccessible.

I wipe the dust off one picture and my eyes keep sliding over its inhabitants as if I'm scared to look at them - Lily, James, and Harry. James is the paragon of paternal pride, with his hand on Lily's shoulder and the way his eyes keep looking from the camera, to Lily, to Harry on his mother's lap and back again. The smile on his face is the one he always wore when he was talking about his son and I had been very well-acquainted with it last year.

I could never throw this away. It feels good to finally have one important, personal thing that I get to keep. I rub off more dust and position it proudly back on the mantel. The rest will not be so bittersweet to sort out. Most include him, in some form. The one directly next to the Potters' family portrait is of a little boy with his arms clenched firmly around the neck of a great black dog who is panting happily. I can barely stand to watch the toddler nuzzle against the dog's fur, sneezing occasionally and smiling widely. It feels like an awful crime to throw away a picture of that happy child, but there's nothing else to do. The picture only emphasises the horrible injustice done to James's orphan by someone he should have been able to trust. I've come to grips with an awful lot of things in a very short time, but I still cannot comprehend the vicious mind that could betray that child. I drop the picture into a new dustbin bag.

Then there's one of the wedding. It used to be a favourite of mine, as it afforded me ample opportunities to make fun of him. I'd tell him how totally absurd he looked in the dress robes Lily'd picked out, when the truth was they made him look even more handsome than usual. Maybe I'm giving the robes too much credit, though. It could have been how happy he appeared. Not that it was rare for him to throw his head back in laughter like he was in the picture, but nevertheless it was hard to replicate the look of unmitigated joy so obvious on his features. Maybe it had been the fact that he was already slightly buzzed at the time the picture was taken (and he'd gone on to drink plenty more, and to the best of my recollection - I was far from sober myself - to be the happiest drunk I'd ever seen as well). He had seemed so legitimately overjoyed for James. He'd flung his arms around James's neck and sobbed unabashedly into his shoulder for a good five minutes - calling him Prongsie and Jamey and all sorts of other childish endearments he'd never uttered before in his life - until James made me pry him off.

How could he have faked it, knowing all the time who he was really loyal to?

The mantel is starting to appear less cluttered, but there are still plenty to go through.

There's one of Peter, James, him and me, all wrapped in our Gryffindor scarves with tongues sticking out and bunny ears on me. There's one of Lily, James, Harry, and him on a blanket having a picnic; and one of all of us in silly paper hats and Harry's face - mouth open, shrieking in delight - covered in chocolate cake at his first birthday. It gets harder and harder to throw them all away, one by one, but I can't stand to look at his face next to theirs. When I come to one where he and Peter are leaning on either side of the 'most monstrous (and precarious) snowman ever created', looks of poorly-contained pride on their faces as they attempt to hold up their dangerously swaying masterpiece, my hands start shaking and I get that feeling that I'm about to finally snap. He spent so many years laughing at Peter, but the fact that he could laugh at him - if what I've heard is true - while he blasted him into oblivion like that sweet boy who'd been nothing but a devoted friend didn't even matter... It makes my blood boil.

Every single picture his face is in I throw away until I come to the last one. I know what is coming. I've avoided it this long because, as selfish as it is, I think it will be the most difficult to look at and harder still to throw away.

In it, it's just the two of us, sitting on the swing in the Potters' backyard we built for Harry. That was our birthday present to him; we were both too broke to afford anything more extravagant than a piece of wood and a length of rope tied to a tree branch. But we did build it ourselves and we spent loving time on it (more than would have been necessary, really, if he hadn't taken an unfortunate tumble out of the tree trying to tie the rope and then kept howling about his broken wrist but refusing to let me mend the bone because I would probably 'take off his hand by accident').

The wood bench of the swing wasn't really big enough for two people to sit on together. We were lucky we both had narrow hips and didn't mind practically sitting on each other's lap to be photographed. He's got his arm around my shoulders and keeps alternately grinning broadly at the camera and turning to kiss me on the cheek, trying to catch me unaware. I'm scrunching up my nose and smiling, pretending to push him away with my hand on his chest, but sometimes my fingers curl around his collar and when he starts to kiss my cheek I pull him forward and plant one fully on his mouth. I remember that day, and I can almost hear us snorting with laughter and Lily giggling amusedly behind the camera. It had been mid-August and we were enjoying one of the last true summer days. He had spent most of the afternoon chasing a toddling Harry around the backyard as the dog, and after he turned back I remember his skin still being sticky from the iced lolly Harry had been both licking and rubbing all over the dog's fur, much to Lily's horror. I remember the heavy, hot smell of him sitting next to me, all sugar and dirt and sweat. This was the picture we enjoyed in private, but hid in the closet (appropriately enough) when we had company.

I can't throw it away. I find that when I try to, I cannot convince my hand to let go of the frame. When I look at this picture, I can't seem to connect the smiling boy I see with the image of the 'mad mass murderer' that's been circulating in _The Prophet_ever since the first of November. The young man in this picture is someone I still love, despite knowing all the reasons that I can't, that my love is not real because the person I thought he was does not exist. I search the photo, but I can't find anything but honest happiness.

Shouldn't I have known; couldn't I have warned them? Everyday I ask myself. I was the one who lived with him, I should have been able to figure it out. I could have saved their lives, but I still can't see it. I still look at him like I'm blind.

But I know really, even if I had seen it James would not have believed it. James loved him. James would have followed him off a cliff if he promised they'd be able to walk on the air. James's trust in him was implicit.

And who could have foreseen it? He was the one person no one would have the sheer nerve to suspect. He'd been beyond suspicion for six years, since he gave up his home, his family, and his inheritance because his relatives were up to their ears in the Dark Arts and he could no longer stand their bigotry. Had he been plotting this since he was sixteen and James's family practically adopted him? Could he have been? When had we lost him? Had we ever even had him, or had he been an eleven-year-old double-agent in our midst? He had been a Gryffindor after all, like all of us. Did that even mean anything?

I don't know any answers. I feel like I've never known less in my life, but I keep clinging to this picture like a damn idiot.

There are so many people I should miss so much more. And I do. I miss James and I miss Lily and I miss Peter and I miss Harry, who my heart aches for that he has to grow up without the parents who loved him more than their own lives and without any of the magic that used to light up his eyes. It's the worst, most shameful feeling I've ever had that I can't stop myself from missing the man that wronged them all so awfully at the same time as I miss them. How can I feel anything other than burning hatred for their murderer?

But oh, I do hate him, too. I hate him more than I ever thought possible, for all the lies he told and how I ever allowed myself to be fooled by them. His was a personal evil, his was the worst possible treason, and it blotted out the sun.

I glance into the dustbin bag and catch a glimpse of that picture of the four of us Gryffindor boys. It was James, that first day, who sat by Peter and me in the Great Hall and challenged us to a pumpkin juice drinking competition. I remember, in the middle, he heard one of the older boys remark disdainfully that he couldn't believe we'd somehow managed to get a Black in our House. James'd put down his glass with a look of great curiosity on his little boy features and asked the older boy what he'd meant. He'd been informed, condescendingly, that the Blacks were only the very Darkest pure-blood family - all You-Know-Who sympathisers - and that the newest of them had just been, by some horrible mistake, Sorted into Gryffindor.

James had made a noise of contempt and asked where the little Black boy was. The older student had pointed him out dismissively, clearly irritated with having to exchange words with a first year, and James had wasted no time calling the boy to come sit with us. And he looked every bit as Dark as the older boy had described. He, of course, had not yet grown into the effortless Black good looks he would come to be known for, but one more educated in wizarding society than James, Peter, and I wouldn't have needed to ask who he was. He was a tiny aristocrat through and through, with the way he raised his chin and looked down at us through analytical and shadowy black-lashed eyes. He was a Presence, even at the tender age of eleven, and admittedly I would have believed every bad thing I'd already heard and would later hear about him if James had not been completely unashamed to direct him to sit down and proceed to interrogate him about his family and why he was in Gryffindor. He, of course, did not put up with this easily and told James to shut his mouth and mind his own business or he'd sock him one. James had nodded sagely, looked at him appraisingly, and invited him to join in our pumpkin juice drinking contest, only he'd have to catch up because James'd already had three glasses, Peter three-and-a-half, and me two (I had a choking fit on the last of the juice in my first glass and James and Peter had not seen this as any reason to pause). He'd demanded that we all introduce ourselves and after we'd satisfied him he agreed cheerfully and went on to drink seven glasses of pumpkin juice, coming in behind James who'd had eight, and Peter, who'd had a record-breaking twelve.

After the Feast I watched James go boldly up to that older boy and announce with childish assurance that the newest Black to come to Hogwarts belonged nowhere else but Gryffindor and that he had better not go around saying otherwise anymore. And for all his courage, he got laughed at and hexed, but he was avenged. Our first group prank was exacted at that older boy's expense, and the Rest is History. They were best friends for the rest of James's life.

That night was the start of the best years of all our lives. We were a brotherhood and there was nothing anyone could do to separate us. We grew older and we grew closer. I remember around third year when girls started noticing the boys, and Him in particular. I was worried, then, that things would change, and I told him so. He laughed at me and told me not to be stupid, he didn't care about girls. And for him, unlike most boys, that mantra ultimately held true. I was quite surprised to find out, in sixth year, that instead he cared about boys in general, and in particular, me. It took him the better part of a year to sell me on the idea, but eventually he got his way, like he always did.

We kept that secret from James and Peter, despite an entire arsenal of close calls, until about two months before we left school, when James, convinced that the rest of us should be as happy as he and Lily, tried to set us up with girls. After an attempt at humouring him that involved going on one of his elaborately staged group dates with the girls, we were fed up with his matchmaking skills and told him exactly why we didn't need girlfriends. He thought we were pulling a prank on him and pointedly ignored it, instead trying to set us up with different girls. It took us snogging in front of him and Peter (one of the more embarrassing moments in my life) to convince him to leave us alone about it, but I think Peter was quite relieved that it made James stop trying to get him dates, too.

Peter, James, and Lily were the only people who ever knew about us. Others may have had suspicions - I know of one angry girl, anyway, who'd spread rumours about him being gay after he'd refused to date her - but they were the only ones we ever told. And they are all dead. The closest friends I've ever had.

I look back down at the picture. Whether I can reconcile what happened to them with the boy in this photograph, with the boy in all my memories... He did this to them. And that is something I can never forget, and to miss him is to insult them, to say that honouring their memories is not as important as my desire for him. I will make myself stop missing him. I will finish what I started in the flat that used to be his and mine today.

I throw the picture away.


End file.
